Background Definitions
Vertical—The set of companies producing and selling a category of products to consumers. Such categories including: groceries; cooked foods; books; consumer electronics; gasoline; clothing; furniture; automobiles; and telecommunication services.
Supermarket—Relatively large retail stores having for sale in the store grocery product items for a large number of products. Supermarkets are all members of the groceries vertical.
VID—An acronym for Vertical IDentification.
RID—An acronym for Retailer IDentification.
RSID—An acronym for Retail Store IDentification.
SID—An acronym for Store IDentification.
PID—An acronym for Product IDentification.
CID—An acronym for Customer IDentification.
RSNID—An acronym for Retail Store Node IDentification, which is a unique identification inside a POS computer system for each transaction lane/POS, kiosk, or management I/O device.
TID—An acronym for transaction identification.
PI—An acronym for Product Item.
PIP—An acronym for Product Item Price.
POS—An acronym for Point Of Sale.
POS terminal—An input output device for receiving and displaying data for transactions occurring at a corresponding POS.
POS computer system—A computer system including at least one POS terminal for processing transaction data including sales of goods occurring at the POS terminal.
CS—An acronym for Computer System.
RS—An acronym for Retail Store.
POTS line—An acronym for a Plain Old Telephone Service line.
PID specification—A specification of the data format (such as binary, ASCII, extended ASCII) used to represent data and representation (correspondence of datum values such as character length and sequence of characters for string data values and numerical values for number data) used to corresponding data to product identification.
Transaction—An exchange of goods and/or services, including exchange of cash or credit for goods and services.
Transaction data—Data specifying transactions. Transaction data includes data conveying the following information: PID; PIP; number of PIs; PI discount; time of transaction including one or more of date and time; location of transaction identification information such identifications associated with one or more of country, state, county city, GPS location; RID; RSID; RSNID; cashier identification; CID; transaction total, coupon identification, coupon redemption value, and TID.
Trigger criteria is defined herein to mean criteria that my be met by transaction data.
Reward criteria is defined herein to mean criteria that my be met by transaction data to result in association of reward data with at least one CID.
Trigger data is defined herein to mean identification of data that may appear in transaction data for a specific transaction, such as a CID.
Reward data is defined herein to mean an instruction to a CS triggered by the occurrence of trigger data in a single transaction.
Retailer—The legal entity owning a set of retail stores.
UPC—An acronym for Universal Product Code.
UPC standard—A specification generally used in the groceries vertical to uniquely identify each grocery product with a code.
UPC-A—A specification of a sequence of 11 numerals defining UPC codes for products.
EAN-13—A specification of a sequence of 13 numerals defining UPC codes for products.
GTN—A specification for uniquely identifying each product and defining attributes of that product that are useful for business to business commerce.
XML—An acronym for Extensible Markup Language.
XML document—A data file formatted to a version of the XML specification, such as the 1.0 XML specification.
XML declaration—ASCII text at the beginning of an XML document that defines the XML version of the document.
XML element—A datum stored in an XML document.
Opening tag—Tag in a string of text preceding text representation of the datum in an XML document.
Closing tag—Tag in a string of text after text representation of the datum in an XML document.
XML Tags, or Tags—Text based identifiers defining representation of an XML element. Formally, a pair of tags, that encapsulate each XML datum element in a string of text characters. Text representation of an opening tag begins with a “<” and ends with a “>”. Text representation of a closing tag begins with a “</” and ends with a “>”.
Tag value—Value of a datum encapsulated by a pair of tags in an XML document.
Attribute—Text based identifier embedded within a tag, for identifying an attribute associated with the tag value of the XML element.
Attribute value—Value associated with the attribute of the XML element. Formally, in a conventional XML text representation, the attribute value follows both the text representing the attribute and an equal sign, and the attribute value is delimited by quotation marks.
DTD—Document type definition. Additional specification of content and syntax requirements, and meaning of elements and attributes, for an XML document
DTD file—A file in the format specified by XML containing a DTD.
Valid XML document—An XML document that conforms to a DTD of a DTD file identified in the XML document's DTD tag.
PCDATA—Text in an XML document that will be parsed by an XML parser.
Nested—The property of all XML documents that each pair of opening and closing tags in an XML document be embedded within other pairs of tags, limited by the constraint that each open tab has a corresponding closing tag in the XML document, with the exception of a single unpaired tag allowed to reference the location of a file containing a DTD, and with the exception that the highest level tag is not embedded within any other pair of tags.
GUI—An acronym for a graphical user interface.